A teaching long attributed to The Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidic Judaism, holds that “Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption.” These words suggest that the state of the Jewish people, as well as the state of the human soul, is not primarily determined by action or law, but by memory.
This insight finds its fullest expression in the second of the three central blessings of the Rosh Hashana Mussaf Amidah, labeled Zikhronot. On the day the universe was called into being and on which all creatures pass before God “like sheep before a shepherd,” the Jewish people gather to converse with God in the language of memory. It is not merely a recitation of historical events, but rather a radical claim that memory creates reality.
In order to understand the theological reality of creative memory, it is essential to have an understanding of how memory functions. Episodic memory refers to a form of long-term, conscious memory that enables a person to recall specific personal experiences, events, and situations from their past. According to the research of Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis published in their article “The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: remembering the past and imagining the future,” published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, March 2007, “episodic memory is widely conceived as fundamentally constructive, rather than reproductive.” This means that memories are largely formed by retrieving fragmented bits of information such as sensory details, emotions, and key facts and piecing them together like a puzzle. This model is echoed in the Rosh Hashana liturgy. Just as human beings engage in an act of reconstruction every time they remember, so too the liturgical portrayal of Divine memory reflects this constructive quality. The theological language of Zikhronot mirrors the cognitive insight that remembering is not simply the retrieval of stored data but a generative process, one that brings something new into being through the act itself.
One does not ordinarily think that God requires a reminder of anything. Yet, the liturgy does precisely this: it reminds God to remember. To understand the true depth of the Zikhronot section, one must sit with this philosophically demanding claim: memory is not merely descriptive but constructive. When God “remembers” Noah, the waters do not subside because God has recalled an obligation; the creative act of Divine remembrance is itself the cause of the receding flood and prevents the destruction of the world. In another instance, in Bereishit 30:22, God remembers Rachel and she conceives. Noah and Rachel together trace the full arc of what Divine memory can do. In one, a world is drawn back from the edge of annihilation. In the other, a life is summoned into existence where, for too long, there was none. Preservation and conception exemplify the two poles of creation, and both are set in motion by single acts of Divine remembering. Memory, once again, is a creative act.
However, even as we ask God to remember in the Zikhronot blessing, we are not asking God to remember everything. The tradition is explicit about the desire for selective memory. The Mishnah states unambiguously: “We do not reference verses of Zikhronot, Malkhuyot, and Shofarot if they are negative” (Mishna Rosh Hashana 4:6). The liturgy of remembrance is curated. Certain memories are deliberately excluded because summoning them before the Divine serves no redemptive purpose. To invoke God’s memory of our failures would be to weaponize memory, rather than to sanctify it. Our Sages understood that what we summon during tefillah shapes the spiritual reality that we are trying to construct. They understood that on the day when the world itself is born anew, yom harat olam, the day of the world’s conception, every human soul stands pregnant with possibility. Rosh Hashana asks us to remember selectively, as an act of faith that we are not yet finished. To exclude the negative verses is to insist, liturgically, that what we carry into the new year is the living potential of what we might still become.
What first seems like ritual evolves into a deeply human truth about how memory lives within us and shapes the contours of the soul. Psychologists and neuroscientists increasingly recognize “selective forgetting,” the brain’s capacity to suppress certain memories in order to function effectively, to heal, and to move forward. Far from being a flaw, this is a feature of human memory, as selective forgetting functions as a kind of psychological housekeeping. The Rosh Hashana liturgy applies this principle theologically. We ask God, in essence, to exercise the same mercy toward us that a wise and loving mind exercises toward its own past.
This has a profound implication for what we are doing when we stand in prayer on Rosh Hashana. In addition to recounting history, we are attempting to direct Divine memory with hopes of invoking a new reality. We are asking that the God who remembered Noah in the ark, who remembered Rachel who begged to conceive, who remembered the slaves in Egypt, who swore an oath at Moriah, to remember us now, in our particular exile and confusion, and that this remembrance function as it always has: as the opening for a new possibility.
Human memory operates in a parallel manner. When we recite the names of the patriarchs, when we narrate the Exodus, when we read the Torah over and over again, we are reminding ourselves, as much as we are reminding God, of who we are and what our heritage is. In Judaism, memory is identity.
To read Zikhronot in this way is to receive an invitation. We are asked to understand and participate in the sacred architecture of memory itself. In choosing what to recall and what to conceal, we imitate the Divine rhythm of covenant in an ongoing creation sustained by compassion.
If memory is a Divine act of creation, then forgetting must not be dismissed as its failure, but understood as its necessary counterpoint. The Talmud in Menachot (99a) teaches that both the whole Tablets and the shattered fragments rested together in the Ark. Rav Yosef likens these broken fragments to a Torah scholar who has lost their memory. With this in mind, it’s clear that housing the broken fragments in the Ark transforms forgetting into a sacred gesture, an acknowledgment that even what is lost retains covenantal value.
Just as God commands Moses to place the broken Tablets in the Ark, we are asked to enshrine our own partialness, to remember what we can, and to make peace with what we must forget. In doing so, we imitate Divine memory itself, a memory that creates, forgives, and sometimes, with exquisite compassion, lets go. Memory, in this liturgy, is not only a record of the past, but it is that by which the future is made possible. In remembering as God remembers, creatively, mercifully, and with the courage to forget, we participate in redemption itself, the secret the Ba’al Shem Tov glimpsed.
